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Friday 5 September 2008

Snip, snip, grin, grin, say no more

Toby Young is under orders from his wife to get a vasectomy. But why should men agree to biological redundancy? What about their duty to keep up the birthrate? And what about the pain?

‘Jesus Christ, you can’t be serious. I’ve had two children and I’m willing to have a third. Isn’t that enough pain and suffering for one lifetime? It’s time you did something for me.’

I racked my brains. I knew I had to come up with something better than this if I was to stand any chance of winning the argument.

‘What if you leave me for another man?’ I said. ‘I’ll then have to find someone else and if I’m incapable of producing children my value as a prospective partner will be seriously diminished.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Go and do the business into a test tube and stick it in the freezer. If you ever meet another woman who wants to have your babies, you can use that.’

She made this sound about as probable as discovering a cure for cancer.

Like most men, I get the heebie-jeebies at the mere thought of a vasectomy. Take the operation itself. Evangelical family planners refer to it as ‘the snip’, giving the impression that it is a quick, painless procedure not unlike having your hair cut. But the reality is very different.

‘The first thing that hit me when I entered the operating theatre was the smell,’ says Rory Clements, a features executive on the London Evening Standard who went under the knife four years ago. ‘There was this overwhelming stench of burning flesh.’

The reason for this is that the operation is carried out with an instrument that burns a half-inch hole in your scrotum and then seals up and cauterises the tubes that carry your sperm. The operating table doesn’t actually resemble the laser platform James Bond is strapped to in Goldfinger, but it may as well.

‘There was a lot of very uncomfortable tugging and wrenching as tubes were manipulated and burnt,’ says Clements. ‘The local anaesthetic might have numbed the area, but I could still feel what was going on and it was very disturbing — every bit as bad as I had feared. The operation lasted ten minutes, but it felt like a lifetime.’

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